Chapter One A Stone Wall If you go for a walk in the woods in any northern place in America, sooner or later you'll come across what we came across in these woods -- an old stone wall. Fifty or a hundred or two hundred years ago, somebody clearing a field picked up every one of these stones and carried them a distance and made a wall of them here. Whatever else he did here, the forest shrugged off long ago. But the wall remains. Other countries have ruined castles, pyramids, and Parthenons. We have these grown-over monuments to forgotten farmers. The wall names no names, but whispers much about what must have been. There must have been a homestead and apple trees, a barn, children playing once their chores were done. All that must have been, or why this wall? With enough research into local history, I might have been able to tell you who built that stone wall. But I like leaving the history there in the woods where the moss and the dragonflies know it, and the rain and the snow know it, even if we don't. Copyright © 1998 Estate of Charles Kuralt. All rights reserved.
